Should You Be On Threads?

7 Considerations to Help You Decide

Katie Wight | July 11, 2023

Yesterday, to the tune of a record-breaking 100 million users and the tears of Elon Musk, the new social media platform Threads turned 5 days old. No doubt you’ve seen the headlines and the social posts – so should brands drop everything to get on Threads now?

Here’s Our Week One Summary:

After several shitty quarters of performance due to bad moves (like going all in on the Metaverse or spending years trying to take out TikTok), Meta is in a risk-averse position. The manner in which Threads was launched reflects this.

Lots of downloads by design. In terms of becoming a user of any platform, ever, the barrier to entry has never been lower. Your Threads account automatically populates “under” your Instagram account.
Early numbers don’t indicate sustainability. The initial user response is enthusiastic but the platform's future remains uncertain: A bunch of different user bases want different things.

👉   Some folks want Threads to replace Twitter.

👉   Meta’s published point of view is that they want to limit news and political discourse (which pisses that group off).

👉   Then there are folks who just want it to be a “fun place,” but others worry that it will turn into another Instagram.

If Meta can’t figure out how to clearly differentiate Threads from the rest of its platform suite – and ensure the differentiation is relevant to a big enough user base – it’s not going to last. Right now Meta leadership (Zuck and Mosseri) don’t appear to have a North Star outside of bringing down Elon Musk.
Meta didn’t fully flesh out their vision for the platform before it was released. Basic features such as search, hashtags, messenger, or a following feed don’t exist. When it comes to the actual product development, they’ve prioritized stealing Twitter users before articulating a clear point of view for the platform.
The battle of two billionaires is depressing in an ethical and existential way. It’s wild to watch the world celebrating Mark Zuckerberg after nearly a decade of rampant transphobia, antisemitism, child abuse promotion, and election interference on Meta platforms. For sure, Elon Musk is a sociopath playing for the wrong team, but do we really trust Zuck to do any better? I’m kinda hoping Meta messes this up while the world learns about how badly we need an alternative to Twitter, setting the stage for a female founder with integrity to enter the chat.

If you prefer publishing words to video and think it’s kinda fun, then spend 30 minutes/day on the app for the next week or so and see how it goes. I recommend 3 to 5 posts per day. One-liners, fill-in-the-blanks, or questions. Find accounts – influencers, organizations, artists, and authors – that matter to your target audience and engage with their Threads, using the Quote function to get some targeted traction (note, there’s no way to schedule content right now).

Now could be a good time to experiment due to ease and early momentum. I posted a few times from @strongbrandsocial this past weekend starting on Friday and reached 5,000 followers by Monday morning. The posts took 15 to 30 seconds each (after a few hours of scrolling to learn what kind of content I’d want to post).

If you don’t have the time or bandwidth, don’t worry about it. It’s going to be another couple of months before we know if Threads has staying power. If it’s not the most efficient path to your brand’s revenue goals right now, do not stop other projects to hop on board.

If you have questions about what platforms your brand should be on, how often you should post, how much time and money you should spend, and how to measure ROI from your content and social media strategy, apply to work with us. We help our clients stay focused through the chaos to grow faster with less effort inside of social strategies that feel good and perform even better.
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